The Gans

Running.

Being a goat and all I’d usually be running all the time from my...predators. Not the people I’d lived with my whole life. My family, my friends, my... brother.

I could hear hooves behind me the same as mine. Hooves that once protected me were now chasing me to the bowels of hell, the Gans.

My home was the Adlyns, which I was currently being chased away from. I could hear my father speaking in our home language in my head, which to humans would sound like ‘Baaa’. I could hear him saying, ”I can’t believe my son would do something so wretched.”

Something that plays in my head again and again like a broken record.

Rolling down the grassy hills of the Adlyns used to be a dream now only turned into a cruel nightmare.

One goat and a whole herd right behind me, how were they not gaining on me? One, I could be extremely fast, but that was unlikely considering my small feeble form. Or they could brace themselves for the inevitable running me into the Gans. I knew it was the latter, but either way led to death.

The flowered, tall grass was what I once ate, played, rolled, and lived in, but all that was being taken away by the very people who did that alongside me.

I was hopelessly tripping, falling, and running as fast as I could, but...why? Either way, I died. Either way, I’d never got to see my family again, and yet... I still had the will to live and push through. Quite the joke if I do say so myself.

I could hear them slowing as we neared the treacherous vines and trees that would suck me in and eventually suffocate me. I kept running, hearing fewer and fewer hooves stomping on the memories I was leaving behind, but they were crushed. I looked back to my herd one last time hoping to see sad eyes, but all I saw were glares at least as much as a goat could muster.

So, I turned around and kept running hooves beating the ground until finally broke through to where my soul would forever lay in distress; the Gans.